Following this morning’s problems we’ll be performing some emergency maintenance tomorrow (11th May 2012) to ensure the same problem doesn’t affect services again.

At some point during 4.30am until 6.30am (GMT+1) repository access will be unavailable for around 1 hour for some users within Codebase. While repositories are unavailable, you will receive a message saying your repository is temporarily unavailable. We will also be performing some maintenance on our database servers, which may result in some servers being unavailable for a few moments.

Today at 12.04pm, our monitoring system alerted us to some issue with one of our storage nodes. The issues initially presented themselves as extremely high load on the node in question however we were unable to access the server in order to perform any checks. Following our internal procedures for such an event, we proceeded to investigate any causes for high load and were unable to find any reason for this on our application servers.

At this point, we had to consider the possibility of a more serious error on the storage node in question. We despatched a team to the datacentre to investigate the host and discovered the server was displaying the same symptons as those experienced around 200 days ago. This meant we needed to hard reboot the server which, including a disk check, took around 25 minutes to complete and the service was back to normal at 13:15pm.

Unfortunately, there were a number of points which could have been performed better which we are already working to improve:

The failure of a single storage node had too much impact on the Codebase application. In the event a failure of a storage server, Codebase is designed to handle this by disabling repositories which are located on that server to avoid congestion on our frontend web processes. Unfortunately, this did not kick in as desired and our web processes quickly became saturated with requests for data stored on the unresponsive storage node. We have already implemented procedures to ensure that un-affected repositories remain accessible in the event of any future failures of this nature.

We were misled by our monitoring when we assumed high load on the server. The process to determine the root cause of the failure was slowed down by investigations surrounding the failed node. We have implemented internal procedures to ensure that detecting issues such as these is faster.

Emergency Maintenance. We are going to be undertaking some emergency maintenance tomorrow morning from 4.30am until 6.30am (GMT+1) which will mean that repository access is unavailable for around 1 hour for some users within Codebase. When repositories are unavailable, you will receive a message saying your repository is temporarily unavailable.

I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise for any inconvenience caused by these issues and assure all our customers & users that, as always, we’re working tirelessly to ensure the Codebase platform remains fast & stable.

There you have it. Your tickets exported as a CSV file.

Billed Time Sessions

We’ve had frequent requests for billed time session groups to be account-wide, so that time sessions from different projects can be grouped together under one billed group for billing purposes.

Your time session groups will now be able to contain sessions from any project in your account.

Account Wide Filtering

As well as making time session groups account-wide, we’ve also improved the filtering ability to filter time sessions from the global report. Just hit the ‘Filter Time Sessions’ button and you’ll be able to search on Occurred On, User, Company, Ticket Number, Milestone or Billed Group.

We hope these updates make time sessions easier to use and more flexible.

• If the ticket properties change while you’re on this page, the appropriate details will be updated live in the tab banner at the top of the page.
• If another user or the customer posts any further information to the ticket, it will be automatically inserted into the page.
• If another member of staff opens up the same ticket as you, a small alert will be displayed on the page to both users letting them know who else is viewing the ticket.

Selecting this link will immediately log a user out and revoke their access to the web interface, repository acces, RSS feeds and the API. Additionally, a user will not receive any watcher notifications while they’re disabled.

To re-enable a user, just go back to the user management screen and click “Enable”.

He’s already got stuck in working on the new Sirportly WHMCS module and is now furiously working away at creating import tools for it too!

If you need support with any of our products, you’ll probably be hearing from him soon!

If you use aTech Identity to login to our services, you can follow the steps below to add links to your browser’s bookmark bar.

1. Head over to identity.atechmedia.com and login with your aTech Identity username & password. Ensure that you click the ‘Remember Me’ checkbox.
2. The aTech Identity page shows all the services which are assigned to your account. Simply drag one of these links to your bookmark bar.
3. Click the link to quickly login to the selected service. This will achieve the same behaviour as clicking on URLs from the aTech Identity bar. within our applications.

The new support sports a snazzy looking icon for when you add it to the home screen (both retina and low-res devices).

As soon as you click “Remember Me” the dialog will disappear and we’ll remember your session for the next 6 months before you will be asked to re-confirm your credentials.

Ensuring many browsers can be remembered

In this modern day, a user doesn’t usually just use one browser (or computer) to access the web – for example, you may use an iPad or other mobile device to access your Sirportly account as well as your normal web browser.

A problem which many websites suffer from is only allowing you to have one browser associated with your account which means as soon as you login and remember your session with another browser, any other browser you have done this on will be immediately invalidated. This mostly happens because developers store a token on your user object which is overridden with a new token each time you press “Remember Me”.

In Sirportly, we store our tokens (in fact, we don’t store plain-text tokens at all, we just store hashes of them) in a separate table with a link back to your actual user account. This allows us to easily see which tokens are activate, along with other information such as the last user agent & IP address to authenticate with the persistence token.